FirstEnergy Plans to Exit the Competitive Power Business: ‘We Will Become Fully Regulated’

Cleveland.com: FirstEnergy to Sell or Close Power Plants if Ohio, Pennsylvania Do Not Return to Regulated Rates

FirstEnergy has decided to get out of the competitive electricity business, and will sell or close its big coal and nuclear power plants within 18 months unless Ohio and Pennsylvania return to regulating them and setting prices or create a regulation-like structure for them.

"We are not going to wait on those states to decide what they want to do," Chuck Jones, FirstEnergy CEO, told financial analysts Tuesday at the annual financial conference of the Edison Electric Institute, a trade organization.

The problem, he explained, is that FirstEnergy Solutions and Allegheny Energy Supply, the corporation's unregulated subsidiaries which own the power plants, cannot afford to operate them at today's power prices.

An early adopter of rooftop solar at its stores, Whole Foods Market has been considered a leader in corporate energy management for quite some time. And although the company's interest in its impact on the environment is rooted in its brand -- "Since we opened our first store in 1980, we've not only been passionate about healthy food, we’ve been passionate about a healthy planet," its website reads -- it has also found its efforts in energy efficiency, clean energy and distributed energy resources to be smart financial decisions.

We recently had a long conservation with Aaron Daly, Whole Foods Market's global director of energy management, about the company's current challenges in energy management -- both on the supply and demand sides -- and the increasingly complex environment for large commercial and industrial energy managers.

China may be gearing up to pull ahead of the U.S. in the race to overhaul road delivery with fleets of self-driving long-haul trucks.

A number of companies are developing automation technologies that promise to lower costs, reduce accidents, and improve overall efficiency for the trucking industry by allowing drivers to make longer trips that include periods of rest.

In Europe and the U.S., Volvo, Daimler, Uber, and others are testing trucks capable of driving themselves under expert supervision. But several Chinese-based companies are working on automated trucks, and lenient regulations as well as a desire to overhaul the country’s chaotic trucking industry may smooth the way for the technology’s introduction. This could provide a handy edge in the race to develop a lucrative new way of hauling goods.

PV Magazine: More Than 5 Gigawatts of Solar in China Has No Access to Subsidy

Anhui and Henan provinces have both warned that PV plants either completed or under construction under the First Built First (FBF) principle may not be granted scale index, arousing further concern over the uncertainty of China's PV benchmark FIT adjustment.

The initial purpose of implementing China’s FBF principle was to stimulate PV projects’ construction progress. However, with 2016’s acceleration of PV expansion and the curtail of state-level scale index, the gap between capacity filed at provincial governments and the index granted by the central government has widened, and the number of projects that have begun construction without index under the FBF principle has grown rapidly.

On December 5, 1952, a veil of fog rolled over the city of London. It was the start of the deadliest air pollution disaster in British history, and more than 60 years later, an international team of chemists has figured out why.

London’s Great Smog, as the disaster is now known, was immediately (and correctly) blamed on coal. But the details of what exactly happened remained elusive for decades. Now, through laboratory experiments and atmospheric measurements in two pollution-prone Chinese cities, Xi’an and Beijing, a team lead by Texas A&M’s Renyi Zhang has worked out a likely explanation for the Great Smog and other deadly air pollution events around the world. Their work is published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.